El Valle Writer Wars

Thirty some years ago I landed in El Valle because I knew Bill deBuys, New Mexican writer of great esteem, whose second book, River of Traps: A New Mexico Mountain Life, was a celebration of the village, its people, its culture, its beauty. It was the story of Jacobo and Eliza Romero, of Tomás Montoya, of the Hispano community that kept the acequias, hay fields, and traditional practices intact during a period of transition that would profoundly change the demographics of the village once this generation was gone.

I arrived at the apex of their rule. Tomás, my closest neighbor, was the unofficial mayordomo of El Valle: Jacobo, the main character in Bill’s elegy, had died, but Eliza was still there along with the extended Montoya, Lucero, Romero, and Aguilar clans. Bill had left for Santa Fe but kept a studio he’d built next to Alex Harris’s house, the photographer of River of Traps, who’d high tailed it to North Carolina to teach at Duke.

Only one other full-time Anglo family lived in the village, Nancy and Larry Buechley, who’d been there since the 1970s. My family became the second full-time Anglo family out of pure luck: I knew Bill because we were both writers and he knew about a house for sale. But that’s pretty much all we shared and 30 years later I’m pissed: he’s been criticizing my forest restoration project for not being ecologically sound and for making it easier for poachers to go in and cut the big trees we’re trying to save by cutting down the smaller trees. In a sense, he’s right, at least on the latter point: anyone can drive by the access road that leads to our thinning project near El Valle and say to themselves, hey, I think I’ll just come back tonight and drive down this road and cut down a few trees.

If you’ve already noticed, I interplay “my” and “our” because I feel very proprietary about this restoration project. Over the past 20 years Mark and I thinned five or more acres near El Valle and Chamisal as part of a contract stewardship program run by the Forest Service. Villagers were allotted an acre of forest where they cut all the trees except the “leave” trees, mostly larger ponderosa pines, to replicate a more savannah like environment with an understory of grasses—and keep all the wood. The poachers Bill complained about cut the trees on one of the acres Mark and I thinned that bordered our current restoration project. I’m pissed about that, too.

“Ours” is a board of directors comprised of local people from El Valle and Las Trampas, a Santa Fe non-profit that did the NEPA work (environmental assessment) and wrote the grant for the project, and the Forest Service, that wrote the prescription. But I use “I” quit a bit because of my history in the stewardship program and my presence at the table developing the new one. So when Bill wrote the Regional Forester, behind our backs, that our project was enticing the poachers, we wrote back “ . . . we do not believe that thinning to remove ladder fuels from around large old trees is causing poaching. That line of thinking places the blame on the victims, which are in this case, the forest, the trees, and the leñeros [wood cutters] who are working hard to do things the right way.” That was way back in February of 2022. Then the poachers came in early this winter and cut down some more trees, in the same general area but closer to the village. This time Bill wrote the Forest Service and the project board that we ought to terminate our relationship with the Forest Service until they stop the poaching. We wrote him back again asking him to refrain from the blame game and I wrote an article in La Jicarita asking the same.

This isn’t the first time I’ve wrangled with Bill. During the bitter 1990s and early 2000s’ wars between the environmentalists and community loggers, e.g., Forest Guardians and La Companía Ocho, Bill was the statesman-like conservationist, unwilling to get down and dirty to advocate for his fellow norteños against the lawsuits that greatly contributed to the death of community based logging companies. La Jicarita got plenty muddy and didn’t shy away from critiquing his “above the fray” positions that often failed to hold the absolutist enviros to account. So there you have it. Neighbors who don’t much like each other and don’t see eye to eye. Nothing new there (see Unf*#!ing Believable “It Takes a Village . . . or it Should Take a Village”) just another tiresome El Valle story dispelling romantic notions.